[Vitoethiche]

Well we always seem to have nostalgic threads where people speculate about why FM was so much better in its days of yesteryear. I would like to propose another point of discussion. I got out of the Performance PC building game when my Geforce 6800GT went up in smoke and melted the AGP port on my NF7-S. Since then I've had newer systems, just nothing that's been so cutting edge. I've been much more interested in non-traditional use PC's (HTPC, SFF netbooks, Home automation, etc) and modding (for silence, coolness, passive PSU, passive system, etc) in the last few years.

I remember coming onto these forums "back in the day" and reading about all of the crazy things people were doing - setting up folding farms, extreme case mods, LN2 cooling, water cooling, etc etc. It blew my mind what some people came up with on these forums and posted about. Now, though, it seems like there are far less "pioneers" on here who talk about and actually work on pushing the envelope of computing. I feel like there are a lot more people on here who are entirely content with keeping their system build easy, untouched, and un-tinkered/modded, or stock. It seems like a few years ago, a thread about a non-traditional PC topic, like wiring managment, water-cooling, case-modding, or even a general "hey look what we could be using a PC for, I'm going to try and do it and let you all know how it turns out, thread would garner a lot of attention and response from readers. Today, though, I feel like most of that discussion has left these boards. I feel much more at home reading SilentPCReview or AVS HTPC forums than I do reading threads here. 3 years ago someone could have made a thread on FM discussing an innovative computing topic and gotten lots of feedback/support/discussion on the idea. I don't think that happens very much at all on these forums today. Anyone else feel this way too?